The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [265]
William stood still, breathing hard. The damned quarrymen had fought back! He looked at Gilbert. He lay still, in a pool of blood, with his eyes closed. William put a hand on his chest: there was no heartbeat. Gilbert was dead.
William walked around the still-burning houses, counting bodies. Three stonecutters lay dead, plus a woman and a child who both looked as if they had been trampled by horses. Three of William’s men-at-arms were wounded, and four horses were dead or crippled.
When he had completed his count he stood by the corpse of his war-horse. He had liked that horse better than he liked most people. After a battle he usually felt exhilarated, but now he was depressed. It was a shambles. This should have been a simple operation to chase off a group of helpless workmen, and it had turned into a pitched battle with high casualties.
The knights chased the stonecutters as far as the woods, but there the horses could not catch the men, so they turned back. Walter rode up to where William stood and saw Gilbert dead on the ground. He crossed himself and said: “Gilbert has killed more men than I have.”
“There aren’t so many like him, that I can afford to lose one in a squabble with a damned monk,” William said bitterly. “To say nothing of the horses.”
“What a turnup,” Walter said. “These people put up more of a fight than Robert of Gloucester’s rebels!”
William shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know,” he said, looking around at the bodies. “What the devil did they think they were fighting for?”
Chapter 9
JUST AFTER DAWN, when most of the brothers were in the crypt for the service of prime, there were only two people in the dormitory: Johnny Eightpence, sweeping the floor at one end of the long room, and Jonathan, playing school at the other.
Prior Philip paused in the doorway and watched Jonathan. He was almost five years old, an alert, confident boy with a childish gravity that charmed everyone. Johnny still dressed him in a miniature monk’s habit. Today Jonathan was pretending to be the novice-master, giving lessons to an imaginary row of pupils. “That’s wrong, Godfrey!” he said sternly to the empty bench. “No dinner for you if you don’t learn your berves!” He meant verbs. Philip smiled fondly. He could not have loved a son more deeply. Jonathan was the one thing in life that gave him sheer unadulterated joy.
The child ran around the priory like a puppy, petted and spoiled by all the monks. To most of them he was just like a pet, an amusing plaything; but to Philip and Johnny he was something more. Johnny loved him like a mother; and Philip, though he tried to conceal it, felt like the boy’s father. Philip himself had been raised, from a young age, by a kindly abbot, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to play the same role with Jonathan. He did not tickle or chase him the way the monks did, but he told him Bible stories, and played counting games with him, and kept an eye on Johnny.
He went into the room, smiled at Johnny, and sat on the bench with the imaginary schoolboys.
“Good morning, Father,” Jonathan said solemnly. Johnny had taught him to be scrupulously polite.
Philip said: “How would you like to go to school?”
“I know Latin already,” Jonathan boasted.
“Really?”
“Yes. Listen. Omnius pluvius buvius tuvius nomine patri amen.”
Philip tried not to laugh. “That sounds like Latin, but it’s not quite right. Brother Osmund, the novice-master, will teach you to speak it properly.”
Jonathan was a little cast down to discover that he did not know Latin after all. He said: “Anyway, I can run fast and fast, look!” He ran at top speed from one side of the room to the other.
“Wonderful!” said Philip. “That really is fast.”
“Yes—and I can go even faster—”
“Not just now,” Philip said. “Listen to me for a moment. I’m going away for a while.”
“Will you be back tomorrow?”
“No, not that soon.”
“Next week?”
“Not even then.”
Jonathan looked blank. He could not conceive of a time farther ahead than next